Broadway
This feature is excerpted from Disney’s Aladdin: A Whole New World (The Road to Broadway and Beyond) by Michael Lassell.
Musical
Maestro
Clinton Greenspan (ALADDIN). ALADDIN North American Tour. Photo by Deen van Meer. © Disney
Earning a staggering number of accolades for his
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ASU GAMMAGE INNER CIRCLE
Alan Menken
work on The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and the film version of Aladdin, amongst many others, Alan Menken is an undisputed master of the stage and film musical. For this stage version of ALADDIN, he reveals that he had a very particular vision. “It’s always been a dream of mine,” says superstar composer Alan Menken, “to somehow restore the telling of Aladdin the way Howard Ashman and I first envisioned it, and how we wrote it. The Disney film version is a dazzling actionadventure tale with great animation effects and a handful of songs, some with lyrics by Howard and some by the great Sir Tim Rice. But the original concept that Howard first pitched was a tribute to those old Bob Hope–Bing Crosby ‘road pictures’, almost a satire of that kind of Hollywood romantic comedy. And it was also meant to be a celebration of the jazz of the 1930s and ’40s, particularly the music of such breakout stars of the era as Fats Waller and Cab Calloway.”
